The Truth Under the Earth: The Relationship Between Genocide and Femicide in Guatemala

By Colm McNaughton


The war in Guatemala has never ceased. While the Peace Accords signed in 1996 demobilized some combatants and weapons – the killing, raping and torturing continues unabated. In 2009 the homicide rate for Guatemala, with a population of 13 million, is about 8,000 per year. Of these 8,000 murders approximately 10 percent are women and girls.

According to figures from Guatemala City based women’s group Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres (GGM) between January 2002 and January 2009 there were 197,538 acts of domestic violence, 13,895 rapes and 4,428 women were murdered. What is perhaps even more disturbing is that for this tsunami of violence there is a 97 percent impunity rate. One of the main reasons for near total impunity in the Guatemalan context is that the people responsible for the genocidal civil war against indigenous people in which 200,000 people were murdered and 50,000 disappeared have never, nor are they ever likely to be held accountable.

In August and September of 2009 I visited Guatemala, at least in part, to examine how the civil war has been superseded by an as yet undeclared social war, part of which is an ongoing femicide.

This journey really starts for me in early September 2009 in the Ixil triangle, which is an area in the western highlands framed by the three townships of Nebaj, Chajul and Cotzal. It is a fiercely indigenous region which has resisted the colonialism and brutal immiseration forced upon the region since the times of the Spanish invasion. Consequently, it bore the brunt of the genocidal ‘scorched earth’ policies enacted by the consecutive military dictatorships of Romeo Lucas Garcia and Rios Mont in the early 1980s. At this time there were more than 200 massacres and 16,000 deaths, which led to a population decrease of the region by a quarter.

I visited Finca Covabunga, which is just up the road from Chul, a bumpy, dusty, windy three hour trip through the mountains on the back of a pick up, north of Nebaj. On December 9, 1982, 75 men, women and children were massacred by the Guatemalan army. The exhumation of seven or so bodies from two graves – the rest had been eaten by dogs, birds and time – was organized by the Centre for Forensic Analysis and Scientific Application (CAFTA) and it was part of their ongoing campaign against impunity for genocide in Guatemala. In speaking with the folks from CAFTA they were not hopeful of a prosecution – there is no functioning legal system in Guatemala – but they keep on building the case anyway. Over the two days I was in the community, like everyone else I tried to find a little spot underneath the black plastic to watch the digging: a pair of gumboots here, a crumbling skull there, some paperwork in a pocket, all carefully collected, noted and packed. One of the most surreal experiences of my life is helping to clean up the site and carrying plastic bags full of clothing, body parts and personal affects of recently exhumed massacre victims to the four-wheel drive for further tests and safer storage. As the exhumation continued an old woman wept, someone let off fireworks, others cooked beans and tortillas, young boys played football and stony faced older men talked softly in conjobal, a Mayan language.

UDW

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